Talanoa is an email client (Mac, Windows & Linux) that reimagines emails as conversations – grouping messages by person rather than by time, and letting you manage multiple accounts in one clean, privacy-first inbox. It’s the inbox converted to a Slack-like experience.

A lightweight dictation app that works offline and doesn’t send your data to some third party company. I’ve been testing Speakmac for a couple of days now and find it really handy. Also: no subscriptions. One low fee that goes straight to an indie developer. Friends of DD enjoy a 25% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

An intriguing-looking social media platform that focuses on text-only interactions: “A text-first social network, without AI, crypto, reels, video, algorithm, tracking, suggestions and so on. Organic home-grown Internet away from the cyber malls of the corpos.”

With Backdrop for macOS you can use animated 4K video wallpapers (or even your own videos). Low CPU usage, multi-monitor support and lock-screen compatibility – it turns your workspace into a more atmospheric, visually dynamic space.

This is one of those pieces that reframes ‘Luddite’ as something we actually ought to aspire to: not someone who fears technology, but someone who insists that people, not corporations or governments, should decide how tech reshapes our lives. Using AI as the central case, it calls on journalists, academics, policymakers and educators to question inevitability and demand that new tools genuinely serve the public. “It’s time to rehabilitate the Luddites as guides for the present. They understood that the future is not written by the machine, but by those who wield it. To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability and to demand that technology serve the many, not just the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency, and justice must come before speed, efficiency, and scale.”

From the excellent Scope of Work newsletter: James Coleman traces his childhood fascination with factory tours through to the present day. A really enjoyable read in which he explores how these industrial ‘pilgrimages’ have shifted from celebrating manufacturing to grappling with questions about automation, sustainability and social responsibility. “It is one thing to understand a plant’s inputs and outputs, but now we have to ask questions like, ‘Were the inputs responsibly sourced?’ and ‘Do the outputs have a negative impact on the environment?’ It is fun to marvel at elegant engineering and automation, but such innovation raises questions about potential job losses. While initially in awe of the factory environment, we slide down a gradient to sober reality. Now that we understand how it all works, there is a pull to evaluate it, or (if possible) make it better.”

Muhammad al-Zaqzouq – a writer, editor and researcher from Khan Younis in Gaza – describes what it’s like being forced to survive on one meal a day and how he scrambles for looted flour and scraps of cardboard to bake bread. In this devastating personal essay, he confronts the brutal choice between nourishing his children and burning his books for fuel. “Ula looked at me timidly. ‘Let’s use one or two for now, and when the war’s over you can replace them’, she said, as gently as she could. ‘The kids need food more than they need to be read to.’ The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralyzed by the question it raised: How had things gotten this bad, this fast?”